Players go on the offensive in MLB's brewing labor war

Justin Turner and other MLB players started tweeting Tuesday about the frozen free-agent market, as the league’s labor way took another turn. (AP)

There’s a labor war brewing in Major League Baseball at the moment. A surprising amount of top free agents are still without jobs. The player’s union is mad that teams aren’t being more aggressive this offseason. The owners say that players and their agents should take the lucrative offers on the table.

Now, with just a week until spring training — and with six of the top 10 free agents still without jobs — some MLB players have started to speak out about matters on Twitter. The biggest star to fire off a tweet was Justin Turner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who said:

If the true goal of @MLB is to capture the interest of fans, having the best product on the field every night should be the priority. If the best players aren’t out there, it doesn’t matter how long a game is. Our fans deserve to see the best of the best playing for Championships

Turner’s tweet seems to sum up some of the talking points among the players union: Fans deserve the best players in the game on the field and teams shouldn’t tank. Chris Iannetta of the Rockies and Alex Wood, also of the Dodgers, tweeted similar things:

It appears that there are 12-15 Teams that have committed to tanking and or not putting the best team they can on the field. That strikes at the heart of the Integrity of the game and is truly unfair to the FANS who LOVE and SUPPORT these organizations! https://t.co/mjD3bolnjv

As a player you want to play against the best competition in the world. I feel very fortunate to be on the @Rockies who are competing for a World Series from day one of #SpringTraining. What if one competitor plays more teams that aren’t competing? . Unfair advantage. https://t.co/ykDqEZ1T1j

As a baseball fan, I’d be incredibly disappointed if my team is not doing whatever they can to compete at the highest level. Players have been ban for life under rule 21, but is it a double standard to not put forth your best effort as an organization? https://t.co/oKzL4IaqTD

The players’ strategy here is trying to win over fans — which isn’t a bad strategy when you consider the players who are the fans pay to see and whose jerseys they wear. One exception, though: Lots of fans tend to side with the billionaires over the millionaires in matters like this. It’s why many of the fan responses to the above tweets included sentiments like these:

Depends, do you like buying tickets to see your favorite team lose? Sorry, not trying to win?

It’s more complex than that, of course. Baseball’s economic system is built in such a way that players sometimes make the least money when they’re most productive. Players make the minimum their first few years in the league, then head to salary arbitration, where they generally make a more market-friendly salary, then after six years in the big leagues, they hit free agency.

Free agency, in many cases, over-corrects for the years when a young player is contributing a lot and making the minimum. What we’re seeing this year in free agency is teams not wanting to give out longer-term contracts to those free agents who are now around 30 years old and expecting a payday.

The real answer might be that baseball’s salary structure is antiquated and needs an overhaul — but that’s not going to fix the free-agent freeze of 2018. We’ll see if some tweets will.